Why do manga read from right to left, and what happens when you flip them?

Manga read from right to left because Japanese was traditionally written in columns from top to bottom, ordered from right to left. A manga is simply a comic that follows its language's habit. Pick up a Japanese manga and you start at what a Western reader would call the back: frames tend to flow right to left, and page ordering is the same as in other vertical books, from right to left.

The habit has a long history. Traditionally Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese were all written vertically, with each new column starting to the left of the one before. Because their characters mostly fit into square blocks, either direction was possible, and right-to-left columns also suited a person writing with a brush in the right hand while unrolling a scroll with the left. A vertical book is bound on the right with pages progressing to the left, the reverse of an English book.

That affects how manga look. Most manga text is written vertically, which dictates the vertical shapes of the speech bubbles. Frames that come right before or after each other use less spacing between them as a visual cue. The language also changed: horizontal text entered Japanese in the Meiji era, when Western-language dictionaries were printed, because readers otherwise had to turn the book around to read a Western word.

Reading direction became a question when manga went abroad. Some publishers keep the original page order, a notable example being Shonen Jump magazine, while others mirror the pages. When manga were first released in English-speaking countries they were usually reversed, or flipped, but the non-reversed format eventually came to predominate.